I found this website and it irritates me. I had a book when I was a kid that was called something like "Crazy Laws!" and it listed some of the more unusual laws that have stayed on the books of different places for years and it told some of the interesting stories that led to them. A lot of them really are quite weird or oddly specific, and they are interesting to learn about. So I thought that's what this website would be like.

Anyway, it's not. It's actually a pretty idiotic site. Its tagline says, "Big government. Small brains. Dumb laws". But most of the laws aren't dumb, they're just no longer applicable to the times we live in. In their original context, many of them were important.

FOR INSTANCE. It's completely ignorant to refer to the laws against spitting on sidewalks "dumb", when most of them were enacted at a time when the importance of hygiene wasn't widely accepted, and were largely an effort to check the spread of Spanish influenza, which took place for two years at the end of the Great War, and is still unsurpassed in terms of its death toll. It makes particular sense to see these laws in Kansas towns, when the pandemic is considered to have originated from a chicken coop converted to a barracks in Fort Leavenworth. So, not dumb.

http://www.dumblaws.com/laws/united-states/kansas

Postscript: Got interested in Spanish flu and went to look up things about it on the national archives site. It is very interesting, especially the letter to the girl at Haskell Indian School, which is not far from where I used to live.